Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Ever More Russians have Reached Their Breaking Point, Pastukhov Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, March 28 – More than the
tragedy of the Kemerovo fire, the response of the authorities at all levels to
it has brought Russians to the breaking point, Vladimir Pastukhov says, and
that in turn means that the relationship between the powers that be and the
population will never be quite the same again.

Almost every Russian has experienced
that sense of disconnect with and anger at those who rule the nation at some
point or other, the London-based Russian historian says. For himself, it came
at the time of the Chernobyl accident in April 1986 when he was a university student
in Kyiv (mbk.media/sences/chelovek-iz-kemerovo-u-sten/).

It was not the terrible Saturday
when the fourth bloc of the Chernobyl atomic power plant blew up, Pastukhov
says. Rather, it was the following Monday when he saw in the streets members of
the communist nomenklatura going about in gas masks, things that the Soviet
rulers were not giving to the people as a whole.

“On that day,” the historian says, “I
buried the USSR together with ‘perestroika.’”

Something similar is happening among
Russians today. “The authorities of course aren’t responsible for every
explosion, fire or accident, and it is senseless to seek a direct link between the
tragedy and Putin.” Such tragedies happen everywhere, in dictatorships and
democracies, in rich countries and in poor.

And “all these tragedies in human
terms are similar to one another,” Pastukhov says, “but each set of powers that
be responds against the backdrop of tragedies in its own way.The Russian authorities traditionally have
conducted themselves in such circumstance in the worst possible way and thereby
“transform tragedy into a PR-farce.”

“The most important political
document of this tragic week,” he continues, has been “the stenogram of the
conference of ‘the siloviki’ with Putin” It reflects not only the essence of
what has occurred in Kemerovo but the essence of the Putin regime and the
entire Putin era in Russian history – when the former turned to Putin as “’Comrade
President.’”

That one remark
showed that at that table were people who are “stuck in the past century” with
all its failings.

“The powers that be lose points not
from the tragedies themselves because those happen and will unfortunately
happen again but from their response to them. They suddenly in a concentrated
form shows in a specific case all that has long been their moral-political
content, their lack of talent, deceitfulness, heartlessness, greed and
helplessness.”

They did not see how the people
around them were responding to the tragedy, but those people saw and for many
it was the first time and thus a defining moment the powers that be “with
different eyes” than they had ever looked through before. For them as for
himself at the time of Chernobyl, it marked the final break with rulers like
that.

Again, the authorities don’t bear
specific responsibility for this disaster, but they do bear indirect responsibility
because by their attitudes and actions they have created a situation in which “such
tragedies have become the norm of Russian life.” The powers have set a standard
of behavior which “millions of subjects” have copied to ill effect.

Putin’s regime has tried to function
with two different legal orders, one for the elite and one for the population.
But “a legal order either is and is common for all or it isn’t also for all.
And in this is the chief internal contradiction of that social model which the
Kremlin over the course of almost 20 years has attempted to impose on Russian
society.”

The Kremlin leader’s conception of
statehood isn’t new. It is the old and discredited form of rule in which those
near the top can do whatever they like regardless of laws and rules while those
down below are expected to obey those laws and rules to the letter and without question,
Pastukhov continues.

But this system doesn’t work. “The
higher powers that be corrupt the lower and together with it the whole people”
because “it is impossible to combine favoritism and totalitarianism not to
speak of democracy,” the historian says. “In Russia each bull thinks he is
permitted to do everything that Jupiter is allowed” and acts accordingly.

“The power vertical is one of the
greatest Russian utopias,” Pastukhov says. “Already Gogol noted that in Russia
first they put one official in charge of controlling another and then they have
to find a third who will control the actions of the first two. That in fact is
the essence of the power vertical.”

According to the Russian historian, “Putin
has created a system through which no administrative signal passes because at
each following step, it gives rise to its own ‘untouchables’ for whom now law
has been written let alone rules for ensuring the security of buildings.”

“The tragedy in Kemerovo is the
apotheosis of legal nihilism imposed from above. In a country where the
Constitution is not observed, rules from the ministry of emergency services
aren’t going to be observed either. The legal order rots from the head; but judging
from the stenogram of the meeting with Putin, it will be cleansed from the
other end.”

Ever more Russians can see this, and
ever more of them are breaking with the Putin system just as Pastukhov did with
the Soviet one at the time of Chernobyl.